The cause of the outage remains unknown (Picture: Rex)
The day after both Facebook and Instagram suffered outages across the globe, parent company Meta has yet to say what caused the issue.
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Threads were down for nearly three hours yesterday, leaving millions without access to their accounts – due to a ‘technical issue’.
But users are desperate for an answer as to why the platforms were down.
Meta communication director Andy Stone shared on X: ‘Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.
‘We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.’
Within half an hour of the issues first appearing on Down Detector, at around 3pm, the number of reports had passed 90,000 for Facebook, and 15,000 for Instagram.
Users encountered an error message (Picture: Shu)
At its peak, more than 250,000 UK Facebook users reported issues, while in the US more than half a million users reported the outage.
On Down Detector, 40% of reports cited login issues, after users could not load the apps or websites as normal. Facebook users found they were logged out whilst Instagram refused to work at all.
The error messages seemed to be the result of the platform’s login system, rather than the sites being hacked or under a cyber attack.
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On Facebook the outage appeared to affect all platforms, but 89% of reports regarding Instagram highlighted the app – but it has far fewer desktop users than Facebook.
Third-party apps hosted by Meta also appeared to be having issues.
In 2021, Meta faced a major issue after Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp went down for nearly seven hours, leaving millions of users unable to use the apps.
Aspects of the IT infrastructure the Meta apps are based on have been integrated, meaning that problems are likely to affect all three at once.
Facebook has 2 billion daily active users, while Instagram has around 500 million.
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